


The Hollow Space Where Dirt Should Pack

by WhyNotFly



Series: The Aro Archives [4]
Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Aromantic Martin Blackwood, Briefly implied canon typical suicidal ideation, Cannibalism adjacent metaphorical imagery, Choking On Flowers, Chronic Hanahaki, Except he's a big ol metaphor for being aro, Flower eating, Flowers pulled out of mouths/throats, Hanahaki Disease, Hanahaki typical body horror, Hanahaki typical gore, Heavy internalized arophobia, Hurt/Comfort, Just lots of flowers surrounded by minor gore, M/M, Mostly emotional but briefly physical through binge eating, Painful in a cathartic way, Season four canon adjacent Martin character study, Self-Harm, Self-punishment for being aro, The Lonely - Freeform, Unrequited Love (Jon towards Martin)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-02
Updated: 2020-09-02
Packaged: 2021-03-06 16:40:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 12,736
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26252059
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WhyNotFly/pseuds/WhyNotFly
Summary: Love is a tangible thing.  It has weight.  It has substance.  You can measure it on a scale, store it in jars, observe the ways it twists and grows and over-splits its boundaries.  When a body holds so much love—love without an outlet—it naturally spills over.  Seeks the sunlight.  Jon’s body is so small, (and now it looks smaller than ever, frail and sunken in the nest of pale blue pillows) it’s no wonder that his love came overflowing.The only wonder is that it came for Martin.Martin has never been able to grow flowers, but when Jon starts coughing up dog roses for him, he can't bear to let him suffer alone.
Relationships: Martin Blackwood/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist
Series: The Aro Archives [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1714381
Comments: 24
Kudos: 155
Collections: Rusty Quill Big Bang 2020





	1. Seed

**Author's Note:**

> I have so many people to thank for this I'm going to break it up before and after the story. Thank you so so so much to Elodie for helping me flesh out the original idea for this story and being the amazing encouraging person she always is. Thank you to all the mods at Piles of Nonsense for putting on this Big Bang and making it all come together. Thank you to everyone who did beta on this story and helped me make this finished product—ZaliaChimera, EmeraldDaisy, EvanescentJasmine, Jmtleaf, Tonyjasp, and anyone who helped me out by reading and commenting who I've forgotten because this fic has been in the works for so long. And thank you to everyone in every discord where I put snippets as I worked for cheerleading me on and convincing me that this is a story people could actually want to read. You are all amazing and incredible people slash writers and I appreciate you and your help so hard.
> 
> I've always wanted to write the intersection of hanahaki and aromanticism. I hope you all enjoy.

The only memento Martin had salvaged from his childhood home with the barren window boxes, was a handkerchief that had belonged to his grandmother. Her initials are stitched in sharp green thread along one lace-edged corner. AHB. Abigail Hannah. She’d died before he was born, but he likes to think she’d be glad it still sees use. It’d been left behind half-in half-out of the crack between wall and dresser when his mother finally convinced him that the commute was too long, and he should stop coming home altogether. He’d helped her pack her bags and bring them down to the nursing home shuttle with the smiling wrinkled faces printed on the side that loitered on the corner in front of their flat. She was checked in during work hours to have a convenient excuse for Martin not to accompany her. He snagged the white scrap of fabric left behind by a grandmother he never knew, and then he left the only home he’d ever lived in.

Sometimes, Martin thinks, maybe his mother had something of the Eye in her. Maybe she could see it in him, the hollow space where dirt should pack. The lack of proper nutrients to house anything of value. Maybe that’s why she never put in much effort.

In secondary school, they’d had a form of puberty show-and-tell for everyone to bring their first flowers in and _normalize the process_. It didn’t matter what the kids had said when he’d had nothing. Martin wasn’t there long after that anyway.

“Thanks,” Jon says as Martin holds out his handkerchief. His voice is cracked and craggy from the phlegm stuck in his throat. There is a moment when Jon takes it from him that their fingers almost touch, and Martin notices. He always notices. A hope too tired to entertain, but too ingrained to stop the frantic muscle twitch of _maybe_. Like watered-down oatmeal—too thin to clog his throat.

“I wanted to talk to you before we leave,” Jon says, pulling the lace edge of Martin’s grandmother’s handkerchief between the pads of his slender fingers. He doesn’t say _in case we don’t see each other again_ because he doesn’t have to. Martin is used to being the one left behind. Standing on the street corner, watching the car pull away. It’s an unfortunate confluence of being weak and being selfish. No matter what he does, no matter how much tea he makes, he will never stop being selfish, because he’s starting from a deficit. A gap so wide he can never make it up.

“Please come back,” Martin says, and he means it with every inch of the hollow beneath his rib cage. He aches it in every crease and fold of his muscles.

But it is not enough. Jon looks at him—looks _into_ him with those dark, infinite eyes that see so much more than Martin has to offer—and he begins to cough. He pulls the handkerchief up sharply and wraps it tight against the front of his mouth as his throat convulses and his chest flutters with deep, rolling coughs that end in grotesque spluttering and heaving breaths. The lace edges billow from the force of it. Martin stands and watches as Jon chokes out something essential, and wonders distantly if he should be doing something. Pat him on the back. Fetch him a glass of water.

But anything he does would only make it worse.

So he simply waits and politely stares down at his index fingers twisting tight together until Jon’s coughing recedes into silence. When he looks up, Jon is holding out the handkerchief in one shaking hand. When Martin takes it, their fingers almost touch. He is careful to avoid the mess Jon’s left of prim petals, spit-slicked and stuck, shining white-on-white against the fabric. It is apology and explanation and confession all rolled into one, and placed gingerly into Martin’s cupped hands.

“Oh,” Martin says. He is only half-surprised, but it’s one thing to catch sight of your boss and friend and _something more perhaps_ coughing discreetly into his elbow on your lunch dates, and an entire other thing to have the stark green leaves with blood-soaked razor edges in your grandmother’s handkerchief, and to know your _something_ is swallowing against a thousand tiny stinging cuts you caused for him.

“We can—” Jon says, half-ragged. There is blood on his teeth and he licks it away like a minor annoyance. A fact of life he has accustomed himself to. “We can talk about it when I get back.”

“Sure,” Martin says, closing his hand around the handkerchief and crushing the flowers inside it. “When you get back.”

If only it hadn’t been dog roses with their serrated leaves, maybe Martin wouldn’t have to hate himself so much. 

***

Hospital rooms are supposed to beep. It’s in every tv show. It’s in every movie. There’s machines and wires and heart monitors and plastic gadgets clipped on fingers and rubber tubes shoved down throats. There’s beeping. Anxious constant staccato beeping undercutting barely held breaths and murmured discussions of doctors and loved ones, there’s baby-blanket blue sheets and blue scrubs and blue hospital gowns and sterile, white laminate flooring. There’s thin cotton curtains and too-small windows and the constant heartbeat swell of _beeping_ reminding you that this is a precipice. Every hospital room is a precipice to stand on, and you can’t truly leave until you fall to one side or the other.

Jon’s room is silent. Grave silent. Choking silent. But Jon doesn’t have a tube down his throat. He doesn’t need anything to help him not breathe, he’s doing perfectly at lying perfectly still with his ribcage solid and steady while Martin ponders—like a child in math class—the concept of losing what he never had to begin with.

_If you have no apples, and Jon takes one away, how many apples do you have?_

Still none. Still nothing but the empty ache where something should be able to grow.

Martin sits on the hard wooden chair he’d pulled up by Jon’s bedside yesterday. No one had moved it. He takes a deep breath and it is easy, unencumbered, his lungs swelling and receding with a guilty calm. If there was a way to pull the air like toffee from his lungs in one long strand and feed it down Jon’s throat, he’d do it. Jon deserves it more than Martin does. Jon knows how to be alive.

“Hi,” Martin says, and he hates that it’s easier like this. To face Jon now with his eyes closed and his soft lips dropped just a bit slack so that Martin can see the gleaming cusps of his teeth. Like this, he knows Jon can’t accost him about the flowers. The petals that Martin’s mind wanders to again and again where they hide buried in the bottom drawer of his nightstand. Probably decayed by now. He hasn’t checked. He hasn’t touched his grandmother’s handkerchief since.

Love is a tangible thing. It has weight. It has substance. You can measure it on a scale, store it in jars, observe the ways it twists and grows and over-splits its boundaries. When a body holds so much love—love without an outlet—it naturally spills over. Seeks the sunlight. Jon’s body is so small, (and now it looks smaller than ever, frail and sunken in the nest of pale blue pillows) it’s no wonder that his love came overflowing.

The only wonder is that it came for Martin.

“It’s weird,” Martin says, “seeing you like this. So still. I didn’t think you had it in you. Always running around, plucking files, going on and on about your research. You even talk in your sleep.”

Martin chuckles, a bare laugh stripped of any true humor. A puff of air from his nose ghosting over his lips. Jon doesn’t laugh, which Martin supposes is only fair. Only to be expected.

“I watched you sleep, once,” Martin continues, quieter now, the way he might say it to Jon in a fantasy. “I’m sorry if that sounds weird. I’m a bit of a weird person. Maybe you wouldn’t like me so much if you knew.”

Martin peeks over at Jon, but in spite of waiting a few minutes, the first man to ever be in love with him is still dead.

“It was when I was living in the archives. Back before Prentiss attacked. You used to stay late doing your work and I would fret for hours over whether I should stay up and help you. But you probably would have just snapped at me. Told me to go to sleep, that I’d be more productive that way.” 

There is a measurable difference between two people living in the same place at the same time, and two people living together. Martin is intimately aware of that difference.

“But I needed a drink of water one night and when I walked past your office, you were still there. The light was on but you were not, I could see you slumped over your papers through the crack in the doorway. Out cold, but still mumbling your way through a statement.” Martin traces the smooth, still line of Jon’s throat with his eyes and wonders what’s to stop him from following it with his fingers. “I suppose that’s less cute in hindsight.”

In the moment, it had been something like a revelation. The soft wisps of Jon’s hair coming loose from his usual coif and blowing gently in the air of his words. The way his pinched tight forehead softened all along the sides of his cheeks. Martin had tiptoed his way in like a shy suitor in a romcom and slid the glasses off Jon’s face, rescued his papers from the slow line of drool resting threateningly at the tip of his chin, taken off his own jumper to drape it like a blanket across Jon’s shoulders.

It was the moment everything should have begun, if life was the storybook Martin had always wanted. Him seeing the innocent face hidden behind thorns, Jon waking up with the realization he was silently cared for, a perfect bud just waiting to blossom.

Martin had flicked out the buzzing incandescent lights and the darkness had fallen like the last beat of a stanza. A held breath that kept on being held.

_I love this man,_ Martin had said out loud to himself, as if he could learn to fly by leaning far enough out the window. _I am in love with this man. I am in love with Jonathan Sims._

He had cried himself to sleep that night, hope still perching on the crest of every choking sob that this time, when his throat tightened, he would cough up petals.

“I never got a chance to thank you,” Martin says, breaking his own pointless rules to rest his hand on top of Jon’s. It is cold and unsatisfying. “I’ve always wanted a guy to give me flowers. I used to dream about it, as a kid. How romantic it would be, to choke on love, to suffer for it, like a classic hero waiting in the rain.”

When Martin was eight, he used to sit outside his mother’s room and listen to her deep, choking, hacking coughs. They were almost frightening, the way they shook the thin walls of their house as she leaned up against them and convulsed until her body gave up its hold on thick-petaled purple pansies. In the morning, before his mother woke from her self-imposed coma, Martin would gather the remains and bury them in the empty little window boxes hanging out the front of his house. If they grew, he thought, perhaps his dad would see them and know he was still wanted.

They never grew.

“When you wake up,” Martin says, the words tasting less like a promise and more like a lie, “you should pick someone better to give them to. I have no flowers in me to give back.”

Martin’s hand slides up from Jon’s wrist to his shoulder, and then across the thin blue cotton of his hospital gown until it is resting loosely at the dip of his collarbones.

“What does it feel like?” Martin whispers, pressing his fingers into Jon’s skin and rolling them against the hard line of his esophagus. “How far down do they go?”

Jon’s jaw is slack and lifeless, and his mouth widens easily as Martin slips his guilty fingers inside. His tongue is dry and bumpy like a cat’s tongue; it sends shivers up Martin’s arm. This is a place he should not be. He does not belong here.

The entrance to Jon’s throat is loose, and Martin finds himself wondering if rigor mortis starts in the brain or in the body. Perhaps somewhere, Jon is watching this, like a ghost floating over his own corpse. Perhaps Martin should apologize, just in case. But his fingers touch the soft skin of a petal, and he says nothing.

Dog rose again. It’s almost humorous, the disconnect between the sharp-edged Jon that Martin knows and the childish heart-shape of the pink-stained petal that Martin has extracted from his throat. The delicate white core bleeding out into color. Martin brushes the soft edge against his cheek and it tickles. This is Jon. The inside of Jon. Jon’s heart that he has coughed and hacked and choked to life for Martin. Dried out promises from the throat of a dead man.

Jon says nothing when Martin places the petal delicately on the tip of his own tongue. It feels like a second skin, so thin and unobtrusive, but distinctly foreign. It tastes earthy, vaguely aromatic like a single drop of perfume on a blade of grass. He’d thought it might taste like Jon, but it doesn’t, there is just the tough membrane between his teeth and the distant memory of something green and thriving.

It’s impossible to chew, the wet petal too thin and soft to properly tear, so Martin swallows it whole. It’s better this way. More authentic. The petal catches halfway down, sticks to the inside of his throat and his lungs flutter instinctively, unconsciously, driving air up his throat to try and force out the obstruction.

_This is love,_ Martin thinks, as the nurse comes in to check on him, brings him a glass of water for the coughing. _This is what love feels like._

As a child, when he’d first learned of the way love could burrow and bloom in the lungs and grow up the throat and out, Martin had gone out to the field near his house, picked a dozen dandelions in puffy white bloom, and bitten the heads off each one. He’d coughed up more seeds than he’d managed to swallow, but he kept at it, determined to build something beautiful and all-encompassing inside himself.

He’d walked home sun-drunk and stomach aching, knowing the feeling must be love.

It must be love.

“When you wake up,” Martin says, knowing he’s lying even as the words crawl like ivy from between his teeth, “I’ll be better.”

He tries not to think about how much he sounds like himself, alone in the dark, whispering _I love Jonathan Sims,_ just waiting for it to come true. 


	2. Stem

In the last year before leaving forever, Martin’s father had given him a notebook. It was the fancy kind, with a brown faux-leather binding and a ribbon you could use to mark the page. _You’ve got a romantic soul, kiddo_ he’d said in a voice Martin couldn’t remember even after lying awake in his room for hours, breathing quietly in the darkness. _You’ll break a lot of hearts when you’re older_.

Martin kept the notebook stuffed in the space between his mattress and the wireframe of his bed. He’d take it out and flip its pages and write scratchy stanzas of thoughts and feelings as they came to him, trying to make them resolve into poems. The leather went soft and smelly beneath his hands. The pages grew crumpled and thin. 

There was a boy at school Martin liked to bump into purposefully when they passed in the hallways. Just to see if it might spark something. He checked the bathroom stalls carefully to make sure he was alone before opening his mouth in front of the mirror, tongue lolling out wide as he examined his throat for any signs of sprouts.

At night, he’d fish the notebook out and smell the decaying facsimile of leather, and turn the verse-filled pages, and try to write something about the red of roses. Or how violets are blue. He would sit and picture the boy’s face, as if focus could produce emotion, as if detail was the only missing factor in the disingenuous echo of his love poems. He would sit and try to picture his father’s face, but the memory just smelled like fake leather, left out to rot in the heat. 

Martin Blackwood was in love with Jonathan Sims.

It was the worst kept secret in the Archives, and there were many secrets there that swam carelessly near to the surface, iridescence almost catching in the light of the bright-eyed researchers thrown purposefully and pointedly together.

Tim mocked him for it often, in the shoulder-punching way that friendly coworkers do without considering the context of their words. The only person who could not see the way Martin blushed and stammered and clawed at every excuse to insert himself into his grumpy boss’s office, Tim guessed, was the wet cat of a man himself. 

“Your taste in men is abysmal,” Tim had said, leaning up against Martin’s desk in the casual assumption of shared experience. “But I get it. The heart works in mysterious ways.”

“It’s not what you think,” Martin pleaded, but inside his chest he glowed with the knowledge that he was doing it right. The perfectly crafted crush.

“You should make a move,” Tim pushed. “And tea doesn’t count as a move. If you don’t make it explicit, I don’t think he’ll ever notice.”

_And what would Martin do if he did? Notice._

“He’s my boss, Tim.” A broken record. Clinging endlessly to the gap between him and facing feelings that weren’t really there. “Besides, I don’t mind being ignored. I’m happy just to… to admire from afar.”

“You really ought to grow some self-esteem.” Tim shook his head and pushed a hand up Martin’s desk, lifting it to reveal a small candy, wrapped in twisted paper. “It’s a honey lozenge. For your throat.”

“Oh.” Martin picked it up and felt the blood rise in his cheeks. 

“Nothing to be ashamed of. We all get flowers now and then. You know I have my fair share.”

Martin did know, had gripped the arms of his chair with biting jealousy as Tim had hiccupped dahlias and snorted out violets. He sneezed hydrangeas once and spent the rest of the day complaining to Sasha about how itchy the petals were, clogged in his sinuses, and it wasn’t his fault. He couldn’t help it, seeing that woman on his way out of the Tube, with her long black hair and dangling earrings and the way she’d slipped her umbrella open with one graceful stroke.

Tim could fall in love with a stranger in the time it took for them to pass his coffee over the counter. As if there was an excess in the world. As if an overabundant heart was just an inconvenience to be shunted away in favor of the next blossom to take root.

“You’re welcome to those anytime,” Tim had said, pointing at the honey candy. “I have a whole desk drawer because, well, you know how it is.”

“Thank you,” Martin had answered, and hated him. Just a little, deep down. It settled, small and insignificant, right next to the way he hated himself.

The drawer of honey candy is still there, even though Tim’s desk has been converted by Basira into a place to stack statement boxes and historical maps of Ny Alesund. They’re still there even though Tim is gone, growing a new kind of flowers from his mouth and his eyes and the tiny pieces of his flesh gathered together and dumped in a wooden box beneath the earth.

The archives are empty, an answering echo to the emptiness Martin brings down himself. Jon and Basira are up north chasing shadows, according to Daisy, and from beneath the crack of the door to document storage, Martin can hear the steady breaths of sleepers. It wasn’t too long ago that he was the one sleeping there, a pillow pressed anxiously over the vulnerable softness of his eyes. He’d thought death was so simple back then—eat or be eaten—as if there aren’t a thousand creeping things in the world entirely without bodies that can burrow in just as effectively.

There is so much space to house them in the open cavity of his chest. The fog curling and expanding unimpeded by close-packed soil.

Martin snags a few of the candies before he slips into Jon’s office. He moves slowly with the door, minding the familiar creak so as not to wake the girls. There’s a strange certainty resting heavy in Martin’s stomach that even if they were awake, they would not notice him. Not anymore. It brings him a concerning amount of relief. He’s tired of always having to make excuses for himself.

“Hi Jon,” Martin whispers as he shuts the door behind him. There’s very little he can do for Jon while he’s halfway around the world trying to stop an apocalypse. The candies he drops in the middle of his desk are a sorry excuse for an apology. A scratch off the peak of the mountain of what he owes. Martin kneels on the ground beside Jon’s desk and slips his jar from his pocket.

The jar is a heavy thing, thick glass inlaid with diamond patterns and tinged with the barest hint of bottle green. Martin’s mother hadn’t so much left it to him as left it behind in her room when she passed away at the retirement home. The nurses there had given him a single cardboard box, mostly full of old-smelling clothes, and even _his_ nostalgic heart couldn’t bear to live with them in his two-room flat. He’d driven straight to a charity shop and donated almost all of it, but the jar had caught his eye. There wasn’t even anything in it. His mother had died, alone, in a room, with nothing of her own but a few pieces of clothing, an antique clock, and a heavy glass jar that was entirely empty. He couldn’t think of a better inheritance.

The jar is half-full now, pink petals pushed up against the glass. The ones at the bottom are dry and cracking while those at the top are still soft. Martin sifts through the papers and pencil shavings of Jon’s wastebasket and pulls a crumpled tissue free. His fingers shake a bit with the delicate operation of unfolding the paper and fishing out the flowers crushed inside. He tries to keep them as whole as he can as he deposits them gently into the jar. This is Jon he’s handling. He ought to be delicate.

“So this is where you get off to,” Peter says, as if this was news to him. As if he hadn’t been watching from the cracks in the fog with a single-minded dedication to enforcing Martin’s own self-quarantine.

“Peter,” Martin says, resting a hand on the curve of his flower jar, instinctively. Territorially. “I thought you didn’t like to come down here. Too many eyes.”

“Haven’t you heard?” Peter steps forward and leans his weight on Jon’s desk and Martin wants to push him off of it. “All the eyes have scurried off to the North Pole. Do you wish you’d gone with them?”

Martin grinds his teeth until it aches, a thin pulse radiating from his jaw into his skull. “I’m cold enough already.”

“You are, aren't you?” Peter laughs and it settles like condensation, pricking at the hairs on Martin’s arms. “Can I ask you something?”

“You always do anyway.”

“Is it easy for you?” Peter asks, and Martin wants to glare him down, but all it would be is unsatisfying and unhelpful. Like yelling at a rainstorm for leaking through your roof. Nature doesn’t care. He should simply have prepared better.

So Martin just sighs and says, “Is what easy?”

“Being away from everyone. Away from that Archivist of yours.”

“He’s not mine.”

“Whatever you like.” Peter waves a hand in front of his face to dispel the apparently pointless distinctions of the human heart. Martin would judge him for it if he weren’t knee deep in the same moral low ground as Peter on the subject. He wonders if Peter could grow flowers. If he ever had. Perhaps baby’s breath—small, pale, often in the background. 

“Of course it’s not easy,” Martin says. He wraps his arms around his stomach. He’s been doing that a lot lately, pressing skin to skin in search of more warmth from a body that doesn’t have it. Maybe the Lonely has always been in him, permafrost beneath the skin, freezing the budding roots before they can even sprout. Maybe that’s what’s wrong with him.

“Funny,” Peter laughs again and Martin is sure that neither of them think it’s funny at all. “Because if you were out there, on a boat with your friends, you couldn’t be here, on your knees, picking leftover flowers out of the trash.”

Martin feels the numb start in his cheeks and travel down until his teeth hurt and his legs go dead. He lowers his eyes to his jar of heart-shaped dog roses and tries and fails to tune out Peter’s words.

“You like it better here, don’t you, Martin. It’s safer than facing your fears and telling Jon it’s not the apocalypse that’s come between you two, it’s not me or the fog or the Watcher, it’s just you. You don’t want to tell him that there can’t be a happy ending because the princess is a porcelain doll. Hollow on the inside.”

“I’m not—“ Martin protests, but he doesn’t know what he’s protesting.

“Do you think the flowers will crumple in his throat?” Peter asks. “Do you think you’re the only thing left that he lives for?”

Martin grabs his jar and pulls it to his chest, the soft re-settling of petals and leaves nearly inaudible. He rises to his feet and turns his back on Peter, as if it could protect him in any way.

“Yes, yes,” Peter says, resting a cold and heavy arm around Martin’s shoulders. “Best to stay with me and stay away. As they say, what the Archivist doesn’t know can’t choke him on the misery of hopelessly unrequited love.”

“This plan to stop the apocalypse,” Martin mumbles, his lips too numb to form the words properly. “Am I coming back?”

Peter looks down at him, his eyes pale and almost translucent. They trace down Martin’s face to the half-full jar of petals clutched miserably to his chest. He shrugs and Martin can feel the movement roll through him like a long exhale.

“Tell me, Martin. Do you really want to?”

***

The gentle click and whir is almost quiet enough for Martin to miss, but he feels it there, beyond the edges of his eyes. A tape recorder. Just far enough away that he missed the moment between non-existence and its sudden, tangible, inescapable reality. So solid and unassuming, as if daring him to doubt his own memory of a clear desk. The illusion of being unobserved.

“So. You’ve come to watch?” Martin skates a finger around the lid of his jar. “Or, well, I guess you just listen. There’s not much to hear, though. It won’t be very exciting. Unless you like the sounds of me choking.”

The tape recorder continues to buzz, faint vibrations thrumming through Martin’s desk. Sometimes, the tape recorders feel more alive than he does. Martin rolls his eyes and looks away. “Yeah, you probably do enjoy that, don’t you.”

Martin unscrews the lid, oddly self-conscious of his actions now that he is not alone. It’s become something of a ritual, a habit, a one-man religious rite to take a fistful of Jon’s petals and force them down his throat. A little taste of everything he’s putting Jon through. Martin had read once that army bases make their soldiers breathe in tear gas before releasing them into active duty. It’s important to be able to visualize the pain you cause to others.

“I hope Jon doesn’t hear this,” Martin says, off-hand to the tape recorder, as he slips his thick fingers into the mouth of the jar and pinches out a good-sized clump of flowers. He drops them in a pile in the middle of Elias’ desk and arranges them carefully. Pointed leaves closer to the outside. Thick, whole flowers right near the top. 

“I bet you think it’s selfish,” Martin doesn’t look up, “punishing myself this way. I’m not helping Jon. I’m not fixing anything. I’m just doing this for myself.”

Martin gathers the flowers up, a perfect portion of petals held in the tips of all five fingers. His hand shakes as he lifts it to his mouth. 

“I just want to know how it feels.”

Martin crushes his hand into his mouth, the motion familiar and practiced as he forces the flowers straight to the back of his throat. He feels his gag reflex rise up through his chest but he forces it back down. He can’t chew. He has to swallow it all.

The ball of petals is too big, too sharp, and Martin feels the dizzy moment of breathlessness as his body panics instinctively. His throat is blocked and bleeding, his vision swims, his fingers pull uselessly over his lips, dragging his mouth further open. Then, he coughs, and half the pink-stained petals are forced up and out of Martin’s throat into his mouth. One flutters prettily down to rest, sticky and shiny, on the hard wooden surface of the desk. The rest slip slowly down into Martin’s stomach until he can breathe properly again, the air wheezing through the strained and bruised edges of his throat. 

One by one, he licks the petals from his teeth and swallows them. He snags the final petal from the desk and places it gently at the very back of his tongue like a pill. It slides so slowly, sticking to the bloody sides of his throat, fluttering gently with his breath. He can feel it there, like an itching heartbeat inside him. 

He hopes it will stay.

“Martin!” The door to Elias’ office bursts open and Jon tumbles through, eyes wild and hair frizzing at the edges. His jumper hangs loose around his torso and Martin can guess at the gauntness of his chest from the sickly hollow of his cheeks. He is one step removed from skeleton. 

“Jon?” The name is half a wheeze on Martin’s tongue, his voice struggling against the battered edges of his throat. The petal stuck halfway down itches at him and he clears his throat self-consciously to try and rattle it free. “W-what are you doing here?”

“Martin,” Jon says, again, like a spell. Like a mantra. There is something honeyed about how his name drips from Jon’s tongue these days, a promise of devotion concentrated into a single word. Martin can taste dirt in the blood in the back of his throat.

“Just, sit down, Jon, you look like you’re going to faint.”

Jon collapses gratefully into the chair in front of Martin’s desk and only now does Martin notice how his knees are trembling. He grins like skin pulling back from his teeth, like a skull that only knows one expression, but his eyes burn where they latch onto Martin. 

“I’m just a little hungry,” Jon explains, talking fast as if Martin might disappear at any moment, which Martin supposes he can’t fault him for. “I’ve been trying to avoid, um, well, I’m sticking to old statements?” 

Starving himself. And coughing up flowers. Martin can see the bob of his throat as he swallows, dry. Blood on Martin’s hands.

“Why are you here, Jon?”

“I know I’m not supposed to be,” Jon stammers and it’s pointless for him to say, like a drowning man begging for forgiveness after swimming to the surface. “But I think I found a way for us to leave the Institute.”

It’s not what Martin had expected, to be sure, and the sharp intake of air as he gasps pulls at the petal stuck in his throat and rips painfully at the slowly drying blood. He lifts his fist to his mouth and presses it there as he coughs.

“I-it’s pretty extreme, though.” Jon slides one slim hand around another, lacing and unlacing his fingers together nervously. He must crave something. Warmth. Touch. But he’s looking in all the wrong corners. This office has always been cold.

“What?” Martin’s voice is hoarse when he tries to joke and he wonders if it’s from the stinging in his throat or the thick layer of rust that’s settled on his sense of humor. “Do you have to gouge your eyes out or something?”

The clock set into the wall ticks steadily, driving the silence deep into Martin’s bones, the slow crawl of time aching its way through him. Jon stares at him and it is almost painful in its intensity, like the flashbulb brightness of a falling star. Martin cannot look away, because if he does, it’ll be gone.

“ _Fuck off._ ”

“Someone already did it. Eric. Delano. He was one of Gertrude’s assistants. He got out of here, he was free.” Jon winces a bit at his own words and continues, apologetically. “Well, free of the Institute, at least. H-he got married, had a family…”

“Jon.” The blush drags itself unwillingly across Jon’s face and Martin watches like a scientist, full of detached understanding. Clinical interest. “Why are you telling me about this?”

“Because you deserve it?” Jon says like a question. “B-because I dragged you into all this mess and you should at least be able to get out of—”

“You didn’t get me into anything.”

“I left you.” Jon’s voice is so quiet, full of pain, aching to be forgiven, or at least punished. As if he isn’t being punished enough. As if Martin hadn’t betrayed him first.

“Jon, you know I’m in the middle of something important here.” Martin slides his hand along the desk until it bumps into the bottom of his glass jar. He turns to stare at it. He hadn’t had a chance to put it away. Jon’s eyes follow Martin’s and all the words bleed out of the room. Martin swallows and the petal in his throat inches painfully downward. 

“Are those mine?” Jon asks, and for once, Martin’s empathy fails him. There is an emotion in his voice, but it floats like a butterfly, slipping easily beyond Martin’s fingertips each time he reaches for it. Something so full of feeling, Martin cannot even name it.

“I thought…” Martin’s voice dies away, all the excuses he had repeated to himself in his room at night alone feeling hollow and insincere. They’re for him, aren’t they? So aren’t they his to do what he likes with? Why can’t he keep a piece of Jon near him, so near to him, if he’s giving up everything else? Maybe if he keeps them long enough, he’ll be able to understand.

“You kept them.” Jon stands from his chair in one fluid motion and plants both hands on the edge of Martin’s desk, leaning over it towards him.

“Jon, please—”

Jon ducks his head. Martin watches as his back convulses, a shudder running up his spine as he begins to cough. It is a horrible sound, and horrible to watch, the violence of it all, the hacking, deep like dog barks, cut with the desperate, wheezing inhale. To his left, the tape whirs on, capturing the moment with emotionless clarity. Martin watches in much the same way. There is something heavy in his stomach that he wants to call love, but he knows in his heart it is guilt. Dog roses drip from Jon’s mouth. The leaves are bloody. The petals are pink and cruel. Jon reaches a hand into his mouth and grabs at a full bloom, pulling it out like a gruesome magic trick as the long, thin stem slides entirely up out of his throat. At the base of it, there is a little clump of bloody flesh, as if Jon has tugged free something vital and left it, like an offering, on Martin’s desk.

“Together.” The word is half petal, half blood. “We can escape from here together.”

Jon looks up and meets Martin’s eyes. They are hazy from the pain, watery from coughing. Martin wants to be anywhere but here, caught in Jon’s gaze, asking for more than Martin can give.

“You know how I feel,” Jon says, and yes. Martin can count Jon’s feelings where they lie scattered across his desk. Can collect his feelings in jars. But that doesn’t mean he knows. He can’t know. He’ll never know.

“I don’t want to leave if it’s not with you.”

Martin opens his mouth to respond, not knowing even as he does what he will say. One swift word to crush the hopes and dreams of the man he should love, standing pink-dusted and vulnerable before him. Wouldn’t Peter be pleased. Jon deserves better than this. He deserves a better Martin. One that feels instead of thinks. Martin wants to eat his logic, chew and swallow his detached clarity and cough up flowers instead.

“Jon—” Martin’s voice is cut off by a cough, a desperate tickle in his throat pulling his attention. Jon is staring with his bright eyes, the slow slide of saliva still inching from the corner of his mouth. Martin lifts his hands and cups them as the rattling coughs rush through him, sweeping him from head to toe, and there is a moment that rests like a snowflake on the tip of his tongue as he feels a petal force its way up his throat and into his waiting hands. Pink and white and black with long-dried blood. A dog rose.

“Is that mine?” Jon asks, again, his voice a hollow echo of the excitement he’d had before. 

Martin smears the wet petal against the desk. It looks no different from Jon’s bouquets for having been twice-eaten. “Yes.”

“Why?” Jon asks, and it’s a thousand questions bunched together and wrapped up in string. Why was it in Martin’s throat? Why does he need to eat flowers? Why won’t he just accept the happy ending laid out like a feast before him?

“Because I can’t love you, Jon.”

“Did Peter—”

“No.” Martin turns away, finally, unable to stand a second more of eye contact. He picks up his jar and hugs it to his chest. “No, it’s just me. I’ve never loved you and I never will.”

“Oh,” Jon says, with all the eloquence of a small glass figurine of a swan being dropped from a third story window and shattering against the pavement.

Martin curls tighter around his jar, tucking his chin. “So you should probably go.”

“Do you,” Jon swallows thick against something in his throat. “Should I leave them here? For your, ah, y-your…” Jon trails off for a moment and then finishes meekly, “Do you want them?”

Like a delayed reaction, Martin finally feels the nostalgic bud of heat growing in his cheeks. It must have taken a while to force its way up through the layers and layers of ice coating the inside of him. Jon saw him. Jon _knows_. 

Maybe it’s for the best. The sooner Jon sees the reality of the deep, dark well he is flinging coins into, waiting for wishes, the sooner he will stop wasting his time. How many times has Martin told himself that Jon deserves better? In order to reach that _something better_ , he has to sever the daisy chain of ill-advised interest that links him to Martin. Let go of useless hopes. Just like Martin has.

So why does it spread a cold beneath the cold, more painful, more biting—like going from icy air into icier water and learning that the burning in your lungs was a cheap imitation of true suffocation. Is he really that selfish? Does he need so badly to be loved that he would wrap himself like iron chains around Jon’s ankles and drag him down with him? 

Martin thinks of his mother’s glass jar slowly growing emptier, the petals dwindling and dwindling until there are none left. No blood in his throat. No suffering.

“How about this,” Jon says, his long, lovely fingers rooting through the mess of flowers on Martin’s desk. “Just let me take the leaves.”

Martin watches, peeking up from the top of his eyes, as Jon plucks each sharp-edged leaf from the pile. He gathers them in one cupped hand held closely to his chest for balance. Each one is browned with half-dried blood. Jon’s blood. 

Martin wants to protest, but he can’t find the words. It’s unfair, it’s all too unfair, too one-sided, too much all at once. He can only sit there numbly as Jon finishes his task and turns to go. Jon’s shoulders are shaking with just the barest bit of irrepressible emotion. Martin watches him tremble and feels hollow in comparison.

“I’m just downstairs, if you need me,” Jon says, turning back for just a moment when he reaches the door. He looks down at the leaves in his hands and his lips twitch into a somber smile. “But you already know that, I suppose.”

“Take care of yourself,” Martin blurts out. Even in the moment he says it, Martin doesn’t know if he means _forget about me_ or _please don’t_. There is something warm about nurturing a living organism in your chest, even as it tears you apart from the inside out. Something to live for, maybe. 

Not that Martin would know.

***

Martin had dreamed in lavender once. 

The air was lilac-tinted and his breath had tasted like the fancy soap they’d had in the bathroom of the hotel in Durham where the Institute had put him up overnight on an investigation. In the dream, his walls were violet, and the sky outside his windows looked like someone had over-tipped a jar of periwinkle and let it spill down to the horizon. There were no clouds, and in the dream, Martin was sure there never had been. Everywhere he walked through his flat, there were thick bunches of hydrangeas growing in the corners. When he moved past them, the wind would pull at their petals and fill the air around him with a swirling storm of soft and pale and purple.

On the center of his table was a vase, overflowing with hydrangeas, each the slightest different shade, climbing down the sides like ivy and pooling on the wooden surface. In the dream, Martin knew the man who sat there. His back was straight and his tie was shiny, purple silk, distinct against the fuzzy misting uncertainty of his face. In the dream, Martin knew the man belonged there. Martin’s footsteps were silent as he walked across carpets of plush fallen petals. He belonged here too. In the lavender world full of flowers, with the man at the table.

Martin had woken up cold. Every sheet and blanket in his flat was crushed into the cracks of door frames or the edges of windows or the slats of vents. Just outside, he could hear the thumping heartbeat of worms, pressing up against his door. Half knock, half wet slide of flesh on flesh.

Outside his window, the sky was gray, and stuffed with storm clouds.

On the center of his table was an old glass soda bottle with four drooping tiger lilies, their orange slowly going brown from the edges in. Martin had changed their water and whispered a quiet apology for dragging them into this with him. He wondered if he’d rot the same way. From the outside in.

It matters less, in the end, than he’d thought it would. It’s quiet here, in the Lonely, and when he breathes in the fog it is both part of him and not part of him. The distinction is as meaningless as the breathing. He’d thought perhaps that when he let himself drink down the mist he’d finally be full, but it drips into the empty places and only makes him more aware of their endlessly vast expanse.

Maybe he could just become all empty, and then there’d be nothing left to hurt.

There is someone in the fog, someone blurred and indistinct like the man at the table. In the dream, Martin had known him, but here he does not. The violent slash of his bright purple jumper doesn’t belong in this place. His voice bleeds out into the silent air. The man is calling for somebody, which doesn’t seem right, because no one is here but Martin anymore, and nobody needs Martin.

“Martin!” Says the man in purple. He snags at Martin’s wrist and tugs his arm back into existence. It hurts like a dead limb waking up, buzzing pain bubbling down through his fingers. “He’s gone, Martin, he’s gone.”

“His only wish was to die alone.”

“Tough. Now listen to me, listen.” The smudged man reaches up and grabs Martin’s face, tugging him insistently towards him. Oh. Martin blinks against the fuzzing space between them and suddenly the face comes into stark relief.

“Hello, Jon.” Martin doesn’t recognize his own voice. It bounces against unseen corners and comes back to him a stranger. 

“Listen, I know you think you want to be here, I know you think it’s safer here and… well, maybe it is.” Jon has both his hands curled in the front of Martin’s shirt, clinging like a drowning man, and a distant part of Martin finds it odd. Jon is far more real than Martin. He always has been. So alive. So vibrant. He can’t trust in a hollow ghost to hold him to reality. It’d be better if he let go. He can make it back alone.

“But we need you.” Jon struggles over the words as his throat begins to close with petals that are catching in his teeth. “I need you.”

Jon doesn’t let go of his grip on Martin's shirt to cover his mouth when he coughs, and the dog roses splatter messily down Martin’s chest. Pink on white. Martin had watched a documentary on tuberculosis once. Prim white uniforms. Cherry red blood. It had seemed like a beautiful way to die.

“You don’t need me.” Martin covers Jon’s hands with his own and slowly tries to work his fingers loose. It’s difficult to remember how his own fingers functioned before they were fog. He envies Jon’s inherent understanding of how a person should be put together. “You deserve someone better. Fuller.”

“I don’t _want_ someone better,” Jon snaps. He is angry, and Martin doesn’t know why. It is tiring to watch the rise and swell of his emotions, like trying to keep track of all the dancing movements of a bonfire.

“I know what you want from me, Jon,” Martin says and he tries to sound sorry because he is. Sorry. He’s been sorry his entire life. But it’s not the kind of sin he can apologize for. “But I can’t give it to you.”

Jon shakes his head and clears his throat again, eyes narrowing in pain. Martin watches the bob of his throat, the press of something from the inside so insistent to be free. Impossible to hold back.

“You don’t love me,” Jon says. “I know. I know you don’t. I’m not asking you to love me, Martin, I’m just asking you to _look_ at me.”

Jon sinks to his knees and when he does there is suddenly a ground to kneel against. He doesn’t drop his hands from their death grip on Martin’s shirt and it drags him down just a bit until he is staring down at him, gazing into the wet desperation of his eyes.

“Look at me, and tell me what you see.”

Jon tips his chin up and lets his head drop back until his jaw is stretched as achingly wide as it can manage. Martin almost hears the quivering strain of his lips as he pulls them back, squeezes his eyes shut against the pain, and lets the flowers grow.

Martin had only seen true dog roses once. On a class field trip to a botanical garden, in a small area labeled _Roses From Around the World._ He’d marveled over the colors, brilliant classic reds and sunset oranges, delicate yellows and pristine white. The dog rose, (said the small bronze plaque set out in front of the trellis of tiny pink flowers) while technically of the rose family, is a very dangerous invasive species. If left unchecked, the plant will grow wildly, expanding into every open space and choking out the other local flora in competition for sunlight. If left unchecked, the dog rose could consume everything.

The branch extending from Jon’s throat is not thick, but every junction is tipped with a sharply curved thorn already slick with blood. The sharp-edged leaves spill out as they escape the confines of his mouth and brush over his nose and chin, expanding out in a fan of green and brown. Above and amongst them all, nestled in the plant growing its way out of Jon, are the dog roses. Each is perfect and pristine, a sunny golden center weeping pollen, almost staining the bright pink petals where they sway gently in a non-existent breeze. Very far away, a wave crashes up on the beach, but Martin cannot hear it. He is staring, transfixed, at the thing blossoming before him. Jon. All of Jon, laid out in green and thriving color. 

“B-but,” Martin whimpers as he reaches out and cups a single bloom. It’s soft against his skin, and still warm. About as warm as Jon’s hand would be, if Martin were brave enough to take it. “But I have nothing to give.”

Jon’s mouth struggles to move, lips pressing fruitlessly against the stem stretched thick between them. Martin can see the pain in his eyes, the swimming need for air, but beneath all of that still, deeper, the desire for Martin to see him. To understand. But he can’t understand. Not yet.

Martin closes his eyes and leans down just far enough to fit his mouth around one perfect, blooming rose. He resists the urge to bite, instead he slides forward and down, feeling the push and tear of branches bending the wrong way to fit down his throat, the sharp leaves and thorns catching and ripping out pieces of him as they go. He slowly sinks to his knees as he goes, coming face to face with Jon as he takes in his love deeper and deeper until it can go no further. Until their lips are just an inch of stem apart. Almost, but not quite.

Jon’s hands tug on Martin’s shirt, trying to urge him closer, but he can’t. When he opens his eyes, Jon is staring back at him, tears rolling from his wide, dark eyes and slipping over his dry and cracking lips. Staring at him like this, Martin almost manages to believe that the dog rose is desperate enough to invade all his empty spaces until he chokes on it. Maybe this will finally be enough. 

Martin tightens his teeth around the stem of Jon’s roses and _pulls._


	3. Bloom

Sometimes, standing in the dim pools of yellow from the hanging light fixtures in Jon’s narrow office, Martin notices the dried blood in the cracks between the floorboards. Sometimes, nose itching from the acid-sweet scent of dog roses, he remembers the sharp metallic tang in the air. Tim’s hand squeezing into his arm until he could feel the bruises blooming in fingerprints across his skin. 

“I just have a few things I need to grab,” Jon says, his hand still tangled up in Martin’s like choking ivy, his skin still cold from the fog where it seeped in. They haven’t stopped touching since Jon lit their way like lantern beams and led them from the Lonely with the confidence of a man who has been sprouting love for months. He breathes the knowledge of it. 

The flowers sit unsettled in Martin’s stomach, familiar but foreign, like the lacing of white in the dark of Jon’s hair.

Martin follows him numbly, tugged along by their shared anchor point as Jon rifles through his drawers. It’s difficult for him to pack a bag one handed, but he doesn’t seem inclined to let go and Martin isn’t about to make him. Even he couldn’t be cruel enough to take away this little sliver of _something_ from the man who’d risked his everything to save him. To save Martin. 

“Why did you come after me?” Martin asks, and his voice is strained and strange to him, like slipping on a coat from the lost and found that you thought was yours, but is too big in the shoulders and hangs strangely over your wrists.

And Jon laughs, like it’s obvious. 

“Did you hesitate?” Martin whispers. In the too-close air of Jon’s office, he can taste his grandmother’s handkerchief, pressed so deep into his mouth that all he knows is choking fabric blocking out the sour insistence of blood going rotten in the heat. 

“Of course not,” Jon says, and it is clear from the stressed insistence in his voice that he intends it as a comfort. His hand in Martin’s is already warm, so warm, and Martin wonders if he somehow found the heat in the numb of Martin’s skin, or if it is the buzzing growth of new life deep inside him to replace the rose garden Martin pulled out by his teeth.

“I’ll always come after you,” Jon says. Martin thinks of the blood in the air and the distant sound of sirens and the realization days later that Jon was out there somewhere, alone and scared and innocent and that he had missed his moment. The moment where Martin should have shed his rationality and _gone to him_ with all the thoughtless momentum of a leading man dashing through the airport instead of doing what he always does. Wait. Stagnate. Let Jon come to him again and again.

Jon squeezes his hand and his heat pulses up Martin’s arm and curls in the base of his throat and he wonders if it is wrong to enjoy this. To _be_ loved, and not give anything in return.

***

It takes almost a day of uneasy cohabitation in Daisy’s very small cottage before Jon finally coughs again.

“Well.” Jon reaches a finger into his mouth and swipes it along his teeth, fishing out the loose petal and holding it up between them. “Guess it’s back.”

“I’m sorry.” Martin slides his book closed and drops it into his lap. Beside him, Jon is still studying his own petal with focused fascination. “I thought maybe I’d gotten them all. Pulled it out by the root.”

“I don’t think that’s possible,” Jon says, with a warmth behind his words that implies he doesn’t want it to be. Possible. He’d rather the blood in his throat. “It’s not something that can just be removed. It’ll always grow back again.”

“As long as you love me,” Martin mumbles.

“Right.” Jon casts his gaze around for a box of tissues, clearly loath to extricate himself from the comfortable nest of blankets he’s made for himself on the couch. “So it’ll always grow back again.” 

Martin can’t help the hot, tight jealousy that coils in his chest at the easy confidence of Jon’s words. Where had he learned to pick the messy feelings apart and give them names? Who had taught him? When had Martin missed it?

“Well, I guess you’d know better than me,” Martin says and in spite of his best effort, the anger creeps like bleeding paint over his voice.

“Right, you, ah,” Jon fumbles for his words and Martin hates himself for taking the soft ease of Jon’s face and wrenching it back into discomfort. Hasn’t Jon been through enough without Martin twisting every knife he finds close to hand? “You don’t love me. I ah, I remember. And you know that you don’t have to.”

“It’s not that I don’t love you,” Martin says quickly. Jon looks up at him with dawn breaking in the bright spots of his hopeful eyes and Martin would pull his own tongue out of his mouth if he could. It’s never done him any good. “It’s… I mean, it’s that I don’t love anyone.”

“Oh,” Jon says, slumping back until he hits the armrest of the couch. “You don’t… you’ve never?”

Martin shakes his head mutely. He slips a hand out from beneath the blankets draped over his own legs and traces his fingers up and down the line of his trachea. “No. Never.”

“Is that why you, er, collect them?” Jon asks, and Martin can tell he’s trying to be as tactful as he can. Jon has never had a great excess of tact.

“I suppose that’s one reason,” Martin says so that he doesn’t have to say any of the dozens of other reasons he keeps buried in his gut like promises he knows he’ll never keep.

“Can I see it?” Jon blinks up at Martin with his characteristic curiosity bubbling up from the dark centers of his eyes, and Martin can’t think of one good reason to refuse him. He can think of a thousand bad reasons, but he has already given Jon so little, at least he can give him this.

“Gross, isn’t it?” Martin says in the small voice that wants to be disagreed with as he fetches his jar of dog rose petals and lets Jon lift it from his hands. Jon tilts the jar and the petals inside tumble down towards the cap. It looks so big in his hands, the jar, like a sudden, horrific reality of just how far Martin has dug his own grave. 

Jon pulls his legs up onto the couch and crosses them tightly, his entire body a focused point of concentration directed at the collection of his own feelings. Martin wonders, briefly, if Jon’s ever really gotten a chance to look at them like this. So stark and bare and unmistakably vibrant. Maybe he’d just coughed them into tissues and hurried to dispose of them. An inconvenience. A willful ignorance.

“Do they taste good?”

“No,” Martin laughs, the truth spilling from him easily. “Not, not bad either, though, just like nothing, really. Like dirt. Or like...like if you ever pulled leaves off the trees during recess as a kid and chewed them down to pulp.”

Jon nods slowly, and Martin tries to picture him small. Ears too big for his head, wide, wire-frames spilling off his nose. The bright wonder in his dark eyes as he tore a leaf off and chewed thoughtfully, experimentally. Teeth staining green.

“Does it hurt?” Jon finally turns away from the jar and back towards Martin, and the three blankets he’d piled back over himself are a pitiful shield against those eyes that see right through him. On their way up to Scotland, Jon had made sure they stopped and bought at least half a dozen. Blankets. _For you_ , he had said, eyeing the unhealthy pale pallor of Martin’s skin. The blood in him still hadn’t quite unfrozen.

Martin swallows and he can still feel the barely setting scabs of pockmarked scars from when he’d taken Jon into his throat. Thorns and all. His voice aches around the answer. “Yes.”

“Martin,” Jon starts, and his voice is full of gentle disappointment like the first teacher to catch him at his part time job. 

“I don’t need a lecture, Jon.”

Jon frowns and it pulls his eyebrows tight together. “You can’t expect me to just sit here while you’re… tormenting yourself.” 

“Then tell me this.” Martin reaches out and rests a hand on the smooth edge of the glass jar, pulling it gently towards him. Jon doesn’t let go, and in the end, his fingertips rest flush with Martin’s chest. “Say a— a magical genie came out of the air and told you that you could get rid of your flowers forever. No matter how much you looked at me, or, or anyone, you wouldn’t have thorns slicing your throat bloody. Ever again. Would you do it?”

There is a long, tightrope moment strung between them as Jon slowly pulls his hands back from the jar and reaches up to stroke the line of his windpipe. The silence, the consideration, it is genuine, but it is also unnecessary. Martin can read Jon’s answer in his eyes in an instant. Instinctual. Immediate. Like a pupil contracting in the light.

“No.”

“Well there you are,” Martin says, and he wraps his arms tighter around his jar. “We all like to remember we’re alive sometimes.”

“But you don’t _have to_ ,” Jon argues like the precocious child he must have been once, always seeking an answer for everything.

“Don’t have to what?” Martin’s voice is flat with deadpan sarcasm. “Be alive?”

“ _Hurt_.”

Martin shakes his head slowly. “It’s not that I don’t have to. It’s that I don’t _get_ to. Everyone in the world gets this chance to feel something, to create something, and I never will. Even you, Jon, if you wanted you could walk away and never see me again and eventually the roses would wither and die, but no matter where I go, no matter who I’m with, I’m always going to just be empty.”

"You're not empty," Jon says. 

"Not anymore." Martin twists the cap of his jar until it gives with a gentle sigh, the quiet scrape of metal on glass filling the air between them. "Now I'm full of you."

***

It’s easier than he had expected, living with Jon. Their house is almost warm, the awkward space between them on the couch shrinking day by day amongst the casual intimacy of meals across a very small table, or the soft insistence of sharing one blanket even though they have plenty to spare. A charade, maybe, but a nice one. Like the setup to a joke before the punchline brings it all crashing down. Jon tries to only cough in the bathroom, so that Martin doesn’t have to face the fact that his idyllic little retreat is slowly torturing the person he cares most about in the world.

It’s considerate of him. But Martin feels the vibrations in the floorboards, hears the hacking through the silent stillness of the nights where he is occupying their single bed, and Jon creeps over from the couch to spit up roses into the adjoining toilet. He tries not to let it remind him of his mother. During the day he drinks in every soft edged smile Jon feeds him in return for cups of tea and fresh-bought groceries. It’s the least he can do to take care of him, if he’s going to be this selfish.

Martin doesn’t want to leave him.

Maybe he’s addicted, like a smoker, craving the itch of petals in his lungs. Maybe Martin’s just desperate for every little piece of Jon he can manage to get his hands on. The flowers taste like dirt and spit and nothing and they burn when they go down. He keeps his jar on their kitchen counter like a perverse play at domesticity. Like his and hers toothbrushes, right by the sink. 

_Heart medication. Take one handful, twice a day. For best results, swallow while the man you should be loving is watching with his pain-drawn eyes, gripping his own wrists tight to keep from reaching into your mouth and pulling the poultice right from your suffering lungs, even while his gaze—his ever bright-eyed gaze—is fixed on the painful bobbing of your throat._

Jon watches. He had insisted on watching the first day they were here together and Martin hasn’t been able to dissuade him since. It’s obvious that it upsets him, of course it upsets him, he’s like a baby lamb twisted into the shape of a wolf. He startles at his own teeth reflected in the mirror. He watches, and he asks questions, incessant vibrating questions that just barely bite back before becoming commands.

_Why me?_ and _How long?_ and _Does it hurt?_

Yes. It hurts. It burns every time like splinters in his gums, but it is a welcome pain. A pain unlike the gently spreading, rippled fog that had expanded in his lungs and deadened his nerves. This is a pain that says _you are alive_. _You are bloodily, forcefully, alive._

Once, Jon took Martin’s hand as they sat out in front of the cabin, leaned back against the worn, wooden exterior to enjoy the last few dregs of evening warmth before the sun slipped entirely away, and asked, “Do you think life is supposed to be painful?”

And Martin said, “I think if it wasn’t, I wouldn’t recognize it,” in the same tone of voice he had used the day before to choke out answers through his ragged throat when he’d said _pieces of you, Jon. Only pieces of you. I want you close to me, in any way I can, and if this is all I get to have then I want it._

Jon looked like he wanted to say more, the edges of his face glowing dimly orange in the sunset Martin knew was happening just outside his field of vision, the house they share creaking gently behind their backs as they leaned their combined weight against it. But when he opened his mouth, all that came out was a cough and a dog rose, and Martin disentangled their hands so he could stand and fetch the jar.

Martin’s arms are loaded down with bulging bags of groceries, so he pushes the screen door open with his hip. The insulated warmth from inside the cabin floods out and brushes over the red-bitten, exposed rise of his cheeks. He feels something inside him loosen, the melting away cold or the feeling of coming home after having been, even briefly, away. Deeper in the house, he can hear metal clinking against ceramic and that, too, is warm. Flea market warm. Charity shop warm. The piled up collections of a life well-lived, as incongruous as they are perfectly suited to bumping up in a single jumble on a fold-out plastic table. 

“I made you tea,” Jon says, appearing from around a doorway with a slightly stained mug curled in between his hands. His glasses have a glossy sheen where the steam has curled inside. “It seemed like it was cold today.”

“Ah, the luxury of simply noticing blustering winds from inside the comfort of window panes.” Martin shakes some blood into his ears. 

“New poem?”

“Nah. Just life, I guess.” Martin shifts his weight onto his hip as Jon reaches out for one of the grocery bags. They begin a careful, practiced dance of balancing and counterbalancing to shift all the bags from Martin to Jon to the end table so that Martin can wrap his stinging fingers around the mug of tea. Their fingers touch and touch and touch, and Martin notices. He notices every single time.

“What, no tea for you?” Martin blows gently and watches the ripples spread over the pretty reddish liquid. It’s a beautiful color, and absentmindedly, part of Martin slips backwards in time wondering what kind it is, and when he would have bought it.

“No, I’ve, ah, I’ve already had plenty,” Jon says.

Martin lifts the cup to his mouth and sips, closing his eyes a bit to savor the warm sweetness of honey glazing over his tongue. Beneath that, he can just barely taste a bitter, earthy, floral aroma. Martin looks at Jon, and Jon stares back with eyes that want everything to be simple. 

“This tastes like you.”

Jon swallows thickly, and Martin watches the slide of movement beneath his skin. He wonders if he’s just imagining the edge of pain in Jon’s voice when he says, “It’s rose tea.”

Martin sets the mug down on their end table with a click like a car door slamming shut. “Don’t do this.”

“I know it’s important to you to have pieces of me, but I can’t live my life watching you _torture_ yourself, Martin.” Jon slides the tip of one finger up the edge of the ceramic mug, staring down into it as if he can’t bear the way Martin is looking at him. “This way we still have that connection. We’re still sharing, from my mouth to your mouth, just instead of painful it’s sweet and smooth. L-like a kiss.”

“Jon—”

Jon’s finger traces the rim of the mug. “If we ever kissed, I would want to make it like that.”

In the first few days after renting his first flat, still disoriented by the smell of antiseptic carpet cleaner and the empty silence without the droning of his mother’s old black and white telly and the empty hours without any pills to count or meals to microwave or bills to hide beneath his mattress, Martin had stumbled into his bathroom in a haze of sleepiness and accidentally crushed three of the legs of a spider in his sink.

The incandescent bulb had struggled into buzzing light, flickering off and on again before finally settling a trembling yellow glow over the washed out tile. Martin had stared down at the little black spider with the eyelash-thin legs trying desperately to pull the weight of its body up and out of the cracked porcelain bowl. Legs scrabbling. Getting nowhere.

The way he had felt, whispering apologies into the too-quiet air of his empty apartment as he brought down the tissue and gave mercy in the only way he had power to, the way he had felt when he watched his mother walk through the house and tear down every picture of his father hanging on their walls, the way he had felt when he’d heard Sasha was dead after he’d spent months smiling along with the creature nestled inside her corpse.

That is the way he feels when he balls his hands into fists and tells Jon, “The pain is the whole _point_.”

Martin can feel Jon’s eyes tracing down all the trembling edges of him, but he is too far from the surface to swim anywhere but down.

“You’re suffering. Every _day_ you’re suffering. Everyone in the world is suffering. Love is painful and everyone else has to struggle through it, so I deserve it too. I deserve to feel love. You deserve not to suffer alone.”

“I’ve always had flowers,” Jon says, raising a hand to the swell of his throat, and Martin can almost see the vines spreading and catching his words. “I had them when I was a kid, and for Georgie, and for you, and for a whole slew of people who never even noticed me. They’re a part of my life. And sure, maybe they hurt, maybe I bleed a little, but that’s just one part of a thousand, different, equally important parts. Love isn’t just flowers, Martin, and it isn’t just pain, it’s countless, inseparable emotions and choices and feelings. But what you’re doing, that’s just hurting yourself to hurt yourself. It’s… it’s self-flagellation. You don’t deserve punishment, Martin. Haven’t you already suffered enough?”

Something wells up in the hollow of Martin’s achingly empty lungs. “I will _never_ have suffered enough.”

Martin’s hands start to shake and he feels the tears rising up through him like thunder on a hot day and he hates himself. He hates the very core of himself, right down to the barren empty heart that will not flower.

“When you were dead, do you know how many times I sat by your bedside and cried?” Martin wants to reach his hand into his mouth and scratch at his tongue until he can’t remember the bitter aftertaste of dirt. “None. I never cried for you, Jon. What is wrong with me?”

“Nothing is wrong with you,” Jon says.

“I’m a _monster_.” Martin’s voice splits in half over the word and he wobbles forward to come to rest on Jon’s waiting shoulder. Jon’s arms come up and around him and Martin takes heaping handfuls of the soft wool of Jon’s jumper to pull himself in closer as the sobs start to overflow out of him.

“I think I’m uniquely qualified to tell you that’s not true.” Jon’s voice in Martin’s ear is full of gentle humor.

Martin burrows his face into the crook of Jon’s neck as if the world might not exist in the darkness he finds there. “Why can’t I feel things? Why can’t I care about anything?”

“Of course you care, Martin.” Jon’s fingers tangle into and out of Martin’s hair in a soothing rhythm. “You care more than anyone I know. You don’t recognize it in yourself, but I can see it, I see it everyday in the ways you try to help people, in the little bits you carve off to give to others. You sacrificed yourself to save the _world_.”

“I’m just being selfish.” Martin shakes, and shakes his head where it’s pressed into Jon’s skin. “It’s all just a show. I have to put it on, to do more, to do _everything_ to prove I care so that no one knows I don’t really feel it. I have to prove it b-because, because otherwise—” 

“Martin.” Jon pries Martin gently away from him until he can grip him properly by the face and stare pointedly into his eyes. “Your worth is not measured by how much you can swallow.”

Martin can barely speak through the choking sobs that fill his throat and chest with an unfamiliar tightness. Like love, he thinks. Maybe it’s something like love.

“But I can’t _give_ you anything,” Martin says, a final, crumbling defense that has forgotten what it was meant to be.

Jon pulls a hand free to slide the back of his thumb over the shiny swell of Martin’s cheek, wiping uselessly at one of his countless tears. “You give me _everything_ , Martin.”

Martin cries for a long time. He cries until his knees give out, and he and Jon sink to the ground still tangled together by the way Martin’s fists are white-knuckle clenched into the front of Jon’s jumper. He can’t picture the concept of letting go. Jon doesn’t make him, simply holds him and rocks him and says gentle words that Martin cannot hear through the rushing in his ears, but the cadence of their caring wraps around him like a blanket. At one point, Jon strains past him to snag the forgotten mug of tea off their end table and presses it up to Martin’s trembling lips.

“Honey tea. For your throat,” he says, with a crooked smile, and Martin laughs weakly.

“You know, it does kind of hurt,” he admits, his voice hoarse around the edges. “And I do like the taste.”

“Well that’s good. Because I’m not going anywhere.” Jon hesitates a moment, his eyes flicking back and forth as they root through Martin’s gaze, seeking answers without words. “Unless you want me to?”

“No,” Martin says with a selfish certainty that weighs unfamiliar on his tongue. “No, I… I _want_ this.” 

“Good.” Jon presses the mug forward again and Martin leans in and takes a deep sip. The tea has long gone cold, but underneath the bitter earth and brightly vibrant honey, it tastes familiar. It tastes like dog roses. It tastes like Jon. It tastes like planting seeds together in the window boxes in front of their cabin, waiting for their garden to grow.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much to bumble, my fantastic artist for drawing me this gorgeous Martin drowning in dog roses and just so happy. You can find more of her super cool work on her twitter, [@bumbleemumble](https://twitter.com/bumbleemumble), or on her instagram which is [@bumbleemumble](https://www.instagram.com/bumbleemumble/?hl=en) also! She does a bunch of rusty quill gaming art in addition to her TMA art, so if that's your bag definitely go check it out!
> 
> Me? Your humble author? Well you can find me on tumblr [@apatheticbutterflies](https://apatheticbutterflies.tumblr.com/) I'm very friendly so feel free to come talk to me. I post writing and occasionally meta, and right now I'm accepting mini prompts to write while drunk so feel free to send in a suggestion XD
> 
> Genuinely, I want to thank you all for reading. This story has been something I was very passionate to work on and put out there, and I'm so grateful to anyone who took the time to interact with it. I hope it was as meaningful for you to read as it was for me to write. <3


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